Studio One crashes a LOT ever since the new plugin manager introduced in v4.
To fix this, you can simply do a clean rescan of all your plugins. In the plugin manager, click on the 'Remove Plug-In Settings' button at the right bottom. Unlike what you would expect from the naming of this button, it will NOT remove your plugin settings, nor does it remove the user thumbnails. It will only remove some cache files, S1 creates by doing the plugin scan, and starts a fresh scan (which could take a few minutes). Basically this button is named wrong from a users perspective.
Since 5.3 the problem got a bit bigger for me though. I still had a session that crashed. To fix that, I had to disable all plugins in that session and then afterwards re-enable them. This causes the plugins to reload, using the new cached 'settings'.
Cases where you will experience these crashes and freezes:
- Project loading
- Removing/adding plugins or tracks with plugins on there
- Looping. When looping, and the loop hits the end of a loop to return back, that will be the moment things freeze
- The end of bounced audio events. These cannot only cause crashes, but also loud pops in sound
What causes the crashes are plugins that have both a VST2 and VST3 version, but internally use the same ID. This will make S1 use the VST3 version, hiding the VST2 version from the browser. But somehow, there is a bug in there messing things up. It looks like as if you add the VST3, but S1 uses the settings for VST2, causing a crash.
Plugins that I know of that are triggering this are Waves and IK Multimedia. There are others as well, but Waves causes the biggest problems for me.
Recently I also experienced freezes with some AU plugins. And these were so bad, it caused my system to reboot on its own. Also in this case, a clean rescan of the plugins fixed the problem. As these cases were so sincere, I stopped using AU plugins completely in S1 (expect for where there is no VST version available).
I have posted multiple details bug reports, but as I'm running on a custom Mac, Presonus is unwilling to take in my bug report or at least take it seriously. But I can 100% reproduce the above, every time, for every version of S1 of the last 2 years.